A lightsaber fight, a narrow escape, a heroic bit of piloting, and, yup, the big weapon goes kablooie. A shocking bit of father-son dysfunction, telegraphed from a mile away. A confrontation inside, on a spookily lit walkway. Everything played out along its well-worn path. Yet not a single expectation was confounded. "If this doesn't work, we'll have to try something else." "Will we?" (Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith)Įven then, I thought Abrams must be kidding, setting us up, preparing to confound our expectations. Seriously? Three times now the bad guys build a big weapon and the good guys find one small flaw in it and send one party to creep around inside it and another desperate sortie of ships to attack it? At that point, I was outside the movie, thinking about it rather than absorbed in it. one small vulnerability, if only they can find the right pilot and someone to disable the shields. In a rushed minute or two of screen time, they determine that the Big Weapon has. Han says, "oh, you can always blow those up," and I laughed again. There, a very familiar group of pilots, droids, and generals gathers around a very familiar circular 3D hologram of a very familiar Big Weapon, which is posing a very familiar threat to their no-longer-secret base. I can mark the exact moment when I finally grew exasperated. And it served to bring in Han and Chewie, which, despite my having seen the moment in the trailer 478 times, made me tear up all over again. Okay, the coincidences were getting a little absurd, but it was so well done. I clapped when the Millennium Falcon was revealed. I thrilled at Rey cruising through the desert on her speeder bike, a wide-angle shot that called back to an early shot of Luke in his land speeder. Abrams was winking at us, having a little meta-fun. When The Force Awakens began with a droid loosed on a desert planet, carrying information vital to the Rebel. But for me, over the course of the movie, the "borrowing" aspect slowly went from sweet and nostalgic to discordant to faintly ridiculous.
I'm with Brian Merchant: the movie's "predictable, nostalgia-reliant, repackaged thrills" are "a defeat for what made the trilogy extraordinary in the first place-its madcap sci-fi originality and genre-bending experimentation." (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) There's borrowing and then there's borrowing I find it a little weird that this doesn't bother critics more. Vox's own Ezra Klein has argued that it is a feature, not a bug, a way of bringing comic-book sensibilities to the Star Wars franchise. Some reviewers have dismissed this lightly others have dwelled on it a bit, but ultimately forgiven it. It lifts most of its major plot points from A New Hope (and a few from that film's two sequels), sprinkling in some new characters. Warning: this review is riddled with spoilers.īy now, more or less everyone has acknowledged that Star Wars: The Force Awakens closely echoes A New Hope - so closely, in fact, that "echoes" does not quite do it justice.